IBM Hard Drive a Failure?

[Samuel Liew]

Guys, I'm rather disturbed when told by my system administrator lately that most IBM hard drives used in HP Servers are faulty. Hence, we had a few hard disk crashes in RAID 5 involving IBM hard disk. I find this hard to believe as IBM is one of the top hardware manufacturers. Anybody aware of this? Please help. Thanks

[Bill McNAMARA_1 · Accepted solution]

I've got IBM drives for over 10 years (well inherited at least ;))

Are they in a Nike?

You may simply need a disk firmware upgrade, HP like CUs with IBM disks - it means they welcomed IBM customers!

Anyway, there are low level block size difference between the IBM drive and the Seagates, but nothing especially troubleshome to
cause a hw failure.

Do the drives show up on
ioscan -fnCdisk
??
Later,
Bill

[Marco Hogeveen]

Samuel,

If these harddrives are in a Netserver running windows you can check them with the HDD Doctor.
Download it from: ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/ccd/keeper2sdd/servers/HddDr_V3.00b.exe

Marco.

[Shawn]

Just because it was made by Big Blue DOES NOT mean its good. Past Aptiva owner.

[Jesse Molina]

Hi

IBM hard drives since 1999-2000 should all be considered suspect. That means IDE and SCSI drives. This is especially true of the 75GXP and 60GXP IDE models, which there is currently a class action lawsuit being brought in regards of;

http://www.sheller.com/ibmclassaction.htm


I myself have seen a large number of IBM hard drives fail in the last few years. I thought all of the talk and rumor of bad IBM hard drives was just stupid people who were mishandling their drives, letting them overheat, and were generally non technical users. I am most definitely a technically qualified individual, and these drives should just not be trusted in any configuration at all -- get rid of them if you can. They will fail, completely without warning sometimes. Other times, they start to gain bad sectors, and then one day your controller BIOS will stop recognizing them and they will constantly click, or sit there and do nothing.

While the following sites primarily concentrate on the 60-75GXP models, I can attest that many SCSI versions of recent drives are also failing in massive numbers. I know because I have had to swap them out and watch them slowly die.


http://www.tech-report.com/onearticle.x/3035

http://www.tech-report.com/onearticle.x/2799

http://computers.cnet.com/hardware/0-1092-404-1664463.html

http://www.sysopt.com/userreviews/harddrive/reviewhtml/IBM_75GXP1.html

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/IDE/IBM_75GXP_reports.html

IBM has also sold off their hard drive manufacturing business to Hitachi.

The worst thing of all is not that these drives have failed, but the total lack of response that IBM has offered to users of their drives. Instead of doing the right thing for the users, they are doing the right thing for their profit margins. It is deplorable.